Obama says FAA fix steals from airport upgrades

Monday, May 06, 2013

During a White House news conference last week, President Obama said Congress' temporary fix of the government-wide sequester cuts to end flight delays is symptomatic of the nation's deferral of infrastructure maintenance writ large that is undermining long-term economic growth. Obama signed legislation giving the Federal Aviation Administration the flexibility to move money from the Airport Improvement Program, which provides airport authorities with grants for infrastructure repairs and improvements, to the personnel account so that it could end furloughs of air traffic controllers that were impacting commercial and general aviation. Obama "Essentially, what we've done is we've said, 'In order to avoid delays thi...